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New Boat 4 Sled
- Thread starter sleddog
- Start date
Paddling out the Harbor this fine morning I encountered 2 pairs of magnificent birds, the Common Loon. They were not timid, and I passed within a boat length. Although good fliers, their heavy, displacement bodies keep them low in the water until takeoff.
These loons are likely migrating north towards British Columbia lakes where their classic and distinctive calls can be heard. Loons can yodel, wail, and produce other calls depending on their message.
Unfortunately, climate change and man's interference in breeding grounds has reduced loon territory by 25%. Too bad for such a special bird.
Look around your harbor or waterway this time of spring and you may see loons.
These loons are likely migrating north towards British Columbia lakes where their classic and distinctive calls can be heard. Loons can yodel, wail, and produce other calls depending on their message.
Unfortunately, climate change and man's interference in breeding grounds has reduced loon territory by 25%. Too bad for such a special bird.
Look around your harbor or waterway this time of spring and you may see loons.
Paddling this morning I passed a visitor I used to know well: 2016 SHTP Overall Winner, DOMINO a Wilderness 30 built in Santa Cruz.
Built (or rebuilt), owned, or homeported, Santa Cruz has accounted for 8 of 22 SHTP overall winners (36%) and possibly over 50% of entries in 22 races. Paddling along, I mulled the reasons for these results: Fast, seaworthy, and strong designs - check. Fun to sail, especially downwind - check. Good construction -check. Good sailors attracted to such boats - check.
Of course there are other reasons that Santa Cruz has been in the vanguard of SHTP. But as Santa Cruz has recently shut down its last boat building enterprise, memories run deep.
Speaking of DOMINO, what boat handling maneuver did 2016 winning skipper Dave Herrigel manage to successfully pull-off that no winner has duplicated before or since? And no, its not waking up and going on deck to find his boat sailing backwards as did the 2018 winner.
Built (or rebuilt), owned, or homeported, Santa Cruz has accounted for 8 of 22 SHTP overall winners (36%) and possibly over 50% of entries in 22 races. Paddling along, I mulled the reasons for these results: Fast, seaworthy, and strong designs - check. Fun to sail, especially downwind - check. Good construction -check. Good sailors attracted to such boats - check.
Of course there are other reasons that Santa Cruz has been in the vanguard of SHTP. But as Santa Cruz has recently shut down its last boat building enterprise, memories run deep.
Speaking of DOMINO, what boat handling maneuver did 2016 winning skipper Dave Herrigel manage to successfully pull-off that no winner has duplicated before or since? And no, its not waking up and going on deck to find his boat sailing backwards as did the 2018 winner.
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As far as I know, DOMINO and its skipper pulled off two unusual happenings. 1) in the 2014 SHTP, after losing their rudder 180 miles west of Monterey, they were towed at planing speeds back to Monterey by the Coasties. 2)In the 2016 SHTP there was an out-of-control moment under spinnaker when the lee spreader went in the water. Apparently, the mast head also dipped, as before the knockdown, DOMINO's masthead anemometer had 3 cups, and when it came up it only had one.
Have any other readers put their mast in the water?
Simultaneously with DOMINO appearing at Santa Cruz Harbor, a famous ex-race boat from the PacNW also was in town. The boat raced in the 1980 SHTP. Can you name it and her owner? Hint: the Life Sling was invented and tested aboard.
NIGHTRUNNER, a Perry 42.
Like this?
Just because you have to cross the Diamond Head finish line to finish Transpac, doesn't mean you have to cross bow first. After ditching broken main mast, crew of 81' MIR finishes stern first.
Thank you for the reminder! I went back to the shtp 2018 website to read through my race reports, which was good fun.
As an update, my buddy Alex has Changabang signed up for the 2024 PacCup. We'll see ... Here's CaB recently at work, loads of fun ��: https://youtube.com/shorts/aHp_deJn_5c?feature=share
Usually kayaking mornings out of Santa Cruz Harbor is pretty quiet, with few if any boats on the horizon. With spring upon us, today was busier than usual. The Harbor dredge SEABRIGHT has mostly cleared the shoaled entrance channel. But as I paddled by, the dredge crew was working with a sledgehammer and pry bar attempting to dislodge a log caught in the maw of the dredge sucker intake. Success was achieved and I gave them a thumbs up in passing.
After rounding the rusty Coast Guard buoy and reentering the Harbor I encountered a fleet of 5 Quest dinghies owned by UCSC. It was a beginning sailing class and 15 students were on their maiden outing. Instructor Rusty was doing a great job keeping everyone circling CCW in the narrow harbor without any collisions. Very entertaining to watch.
Speaking of beginning sailing, in 1956, before word processors and computers, a small paper book was first self published with everything you needed to know about sailing. Over the years I would guess this little gem of a book and its whimsical drawings, helped more people to learn to sail than any other.
For your bowl of Macapuno, 1) what was the name of the book? 2) who was the author? 3) what was the name of the author's all pink boat?
After rounding the rusty Coast Guard buoy and reentering the Harbor I encountered a fleet of 5 Quest dinghies owned by UCSC. It was a beginning sailing class and 15 students were on their maiden outing. Instructor Rusty was doing a great job keeping everyone circling CCW in the narrow harbor without any collisions. Very entertaining to watch.
Speaking of beginning sailing, in 1956, before word processors and computers, a small paper book was first self published with everything you needed to know about sailing. Over the years I would guess this little gem of a book and its whimsical drawings, helped more people to learn to sail than any other.
For your bowl of Macapuno, 1) what was the name of the book? 2) who was the author? 3) what was the name of the author's all pink boat?
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1. Royce's Sailing Illustrated.
2. Mr. Royce (I could check amazon or my storage unit for the blue-covered version I have, but I'll play fair!)
3. Pink Cloud. If memory serves, it was a flush-decked 24' Columbia.
Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner. LANIKAI has it correct. Congrats to you.
The first time I saw PINK CLOUD, my eyeballs bulged. Pink hull, deck, mast, boom, sail numbers, and outboard. She was one of the early Columbia line of boats built in Costa Mesa.
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'pink' was the hint that brought it all flooding back, that sketch of the Columbia from a port quarter view(?), explaining all the boat bits.
I guess I never read it closely - nice name for a boat, I remember thinking, and maybe the hull was some shade of red...but surely Mr. Royce was exaggerating, it wasn't really pink. I don't remember seeing that option on the Brightsides cans at Svendsen's. Deck, spars, everything? Oy.
Racing Snowbirds in Newport Harbor occasionally brought me up close and personal with PINK CLOUD. There were no shades of red. As my grand-niece answered to my quiz last weekend, "What color do you get when you mix red and white together?"
"PINK!!" she yelled in her loudest, 5 year old holler.
Macapuno for her.
Happy Earth Day! The wind is free. It's not just the oceans need our help. Glaciers are going, going...I encourage anyone reading this to do one small thing today for the Earth...Pick up plastic in your marina, sail into or out of your slip, greet your neighbor, especially juniors, with "Happy Earth Day."
I also recommend reading Heather Cox Richardson's history of Earth Day below. Here it is:
Today is Earth Day, celebrated for the first time in 1970. Coming the same week that House Republicans demanded that Congress rescind the money Democrats appropriated in the Inflation Reduction Act to address climate change, Earth Day in 2023 is a poignant reminder of an earlier era, one in which Americans recognized a crisis that transcended partisanship and came together to fix it.
The spark for the first Earth Day was the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. A marine biologist and best-selling author, Carson showed the devastating effects of people on nature by documenting the effect of modern pesticides on the natural world. She focused on the popular pesticide DDT, which had been developed in 1939 and used to clear islands in the South Pacific of malaria-carrying mosquitoes during World War II. Deployed as an insect killer in the U.S. after the war, DDT was poisoning the natural food chain in American waters.
DDT sprayed on vegetation washed into the oceans. It concentrated in fish, which were then eaten by birds of prey, especially ospreys. The DDT caused the birds to lay eggs with abnormally thin eggshells, so thin the eggs cracked in the nest when the parent birds tried to incubate them. And so the birds began to die off.
Carson was unable to interest any publishing company in the story of DDT. Finally, frustrated at the popular lack of interest in the reasons for the devastation of birds, she decided to write the story anyway, turning out a highly readable book with 55 pages of footnotes to make her case.
When The New Yorker began to serialize Carson’s book in June 1962, chemical company leaders were scathing. “If man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson," an executive of the American Cyanamid Company said, "we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth." Officers of Monsanto questioned Carson's sanity.
But her portrait of the dangerous overuse of chemicals and their effect on living organisms caught readers’ attention. They were willing to listen. Carson’s book sold more than half a million copies in 24 countries.
Democratic president John F. Kennedy asked the President’s Science Advisory Committee to look into Carson’s argument, and the committee vindicated her. Before she died of breast cancer in 1964, Carson noted: "Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself? [We are] challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves."
Meanwhile, a number of scientists followed up on Carson’s argument and in 1967 organized the Environmental Defense Fund to protect the environment by lobbying for a ban on DDT. As they worked, Americans began to pay closer attention to human effects on the environment, especially after three crucial moments: First, on December 24, 1968, William Anders took a color picture of the Earth rising over the horizon of the moon from outer space during the Apollo 8 mission, powerfully illustrating the beauty and isolation of the globe on which we all live.
Then, over 10 days in January–February 1969, a massive oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, poured between 80,000 and 100,000 barrels of oil into the Pacific, fouling 35 miles of California beaches and killing seabirds, dolphins, sea lions, and elephant seals. Public outrage ran so high that President Nixon himself, a Republican, went to Santa Barbara in March to see the cleanup efforts, telling the American public that “the Santa Barbara incident has frankly touched the conscience of the American people.”
And then, in June 1969, the chemical contaminants that had been dumped into Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire. A dumping ground for local heavy industry, the river had actually burned more than ten times in the previous century, but with increased focus on environmental damage, this time the burning river garnered national attention.
In February 1970, President Richard M. Nixon sent to Congress a special message “on environmental quality.” “[W]e…have too casually and too long abused our natural environment,” he wrote. “The time has come when we can wait no longer to repair the damage already done, and to establish new criteria to guide us in the future.”
“The tasks that need doing require money, resolve and ingenuity,” Nixon said, “and they are too big to be done by government alone. They call for fundamentally new philosophies of land, air and water use, for stricter regulation, for expanded government action, for greater citizen involvement, and for new programs to ensure that government, industry and individuals all are called on to do their share of the job and to pay their share of the cost.”
Nixon called for a 37-point program with 23 legislative proposals and 14 new administrative measures to control water and air pollution, manage solid waste, protect parklands and public recreation, and organize for action. “As we deepen our understanding of complex ecological processes, as we improve our technologies and institutions and learn from experience, much more will be possible,” he said. “But these 37 measures represent actions we can take now, and that can move us dramatically forward toward what has become an urgent common goal of all Americans: the rescue of our natural habitat as a place both habitable and hospitable to man.”
Meanwhile, Gaylord Nelson, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin, visited the Santa Barbara oil spill and hoped to turn the same sort of enthusiasm people were bringing to protests against the Vietnam War to efforts to protect the environment. He announced a teach-in on college campuses, which soon grew into a wider movement across the country. Their “Earth Day,” held on April 22, 1970, brought more than 20 million Americans—10% of the total population of the country at the time—to call for the nation to address the damage caused by 150 years of unregulated industrial development. The movement included members of all political parties, rich Americans and their poorer neighbors, people who lived in the city and those in the country, labor leaders and their employers. It is still one of the largest protests in American history.
In July, at the advice of a council convened to figure out how to consolidate government programs to combat pollution, Nixon proposed to Congress a new agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, which Congress created in 1970. This new agency assumed responsibility for the federal regulation of pesticides, and after the Environmental Defense Fund filed suit, in June 1972 the EPA banned DDT. Four months later, Congress passed the Clean Water Act, establishing protections for water quality and regulating pollutant discharges into waters of the United States.
Today, even as Republicans are attacking the EPA by suggesting that Congress cannot delegate major regulatory powers to it, President Joe Biden issued an executive order to promote environmental justice. In the past generation we have come to understand that pollution hits minority and poor populations far harder than it does wealthy white communities: the government and private companies target Indigenous reservations for the storage of nuclear waste, for example, because the reservations are not covered by the same environmental and health standards as the rest of the country.
Today, Biden said, “To fulfill our Nation’s promises of justice, liberty, and equality, every person must have clean air to breathe; clean water to drink; safe and healthy foods to eat; and an environment that is healthy, sustainable, climate-resilient, and free from harmful pollution and chemical exposure. Restoring and protecting a healthy environment—wherever people live, play, work, learn, grow, and worship—is a matter of justice and a fundamental duty that the Federal Government must uphold on behalf of all people.”
Amen.
I also recommend reading Heather Cox Richardson's history of Earth Day below. Here it is:
Today is Earth Day, celebrated for the first time in 1970. Coming the same week that House Republicans demanded that Congress rescind the money Democrats appropriated in the Inflation Reduction Act to address climate change, Earth Day in 2023 is a poignant reminder of an earlier era, one in which Americans recognized a crisis that transcended partisanship and came together to fix it.
The spark for the first Earth Day was the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. A marine biologist and best-selling author, Carson showed the devastating effects of people on nature by documenting the effect of modern pesticides on the natural world. She focused on the popular pesticide DDT, which had been developed in 1939 and used to clear islands in the South Pacific of malaria-carrying mosquitoes during World War II. Deployed as an insect killer in the U.S. after the war, DDT was poisoning the natural food chain in American waters.
DDT sprayed on vegetation washed into the oceans. It concentrated in fish, which were then eaten by birds of prey, especially ospreys. The DDT caused the birds to lay eggs with abnormally thin eggshells, so thin the eggs cracked in the nest when the parent birds tried to incubate them. And so the birds began to die off.
Carson was unable to interest any publishing company in the story of DDT. Finally, frustrated at the popular lack of interest in the reasons for the devastation of birds, she decided to write the story anyway, turning out a highly readable book with 55 pages of footnotes to make her case.
When The New Yorker began to serialize Carson’s book in June 1962, chemical company leaders were scathing. “If man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson," an executive of the American Cyanamid Company said, "we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth." Officers of Monsanto questioned Carson's sanity.
But her portrait of the dangerous overuse of chemicals and their effect on living organisms caught readers’ attention. They were willing to listen. Carson’s book sold more than half a million copies in 24 countries.
Democratic president John F. Kennedy asked the President’s Science Advisory Committee to look into Carson’s argument, and the committee vindicated her. Before she died of breast cancer in 1964, Carson noted: "Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself? [We are] challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves."
Meanwhile, a number of scientists followed up on Carson’s argument and in 1967 organized the Environmental Defense Fund to protect the environment by lobbying for a ban on DDT. As they worked, Americans began to pay closer attention to human effects on the environment, especially after three crucial moments: First, on December 24, 1968, William Anders took a color picture of the Earth rising over the horizon of the moon from outer space during the Apollo 8 mission, powerfully illustrating the beauty and isolation of the globe on which we all live.
Then, over 10 days in January–February 1969, a massive oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, poured between 80,000 and 100,000 barrels of oil into the Pacific, fouling 35 miles of California beaches and killing seabirds, dolphins, sea lions, and elephant seals. Public outrage ran so high that President Nixon himself, a Republican, went to Santa Barbara in March to see the cleanup efforts, telling the American public that “the Santa Barbara incident has frankly touched the conscience of the American people.”
And then, in June 1969, the chemical contaminants that had been dumped into Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire. A dumping ground for local heavy industry, the river had actually burned more than ten times in the previous century, but with increased focus on environmental damage, this time the burning river garnered national attention.
In February 1970, President Richard M. Nixon sent to Congress a special message “on environmental quality.” “[W]e…have too casually and too long abused our natural environment,” he wrote. “The time has come when we can wait no longer to repair the damage already done, and to establish new criteria to guide us in the future.”
“The tasks that need doing require money, resolve and ingenuity,” Nixon said, “and they are too big to be done by government alone. They call for fundamentally new philosophies of land, air and water use, for stricter regulation, for expanded government action, for greater citizen involvement, and for new programs to ensure that government, industry and individuals all are called on to do their share of the job and to pay their share of the cost.”
Nixon called for a 37-point program with 23 legislative proposals and 14 new administrative measures to control water and air pollution, manage solid waste, protect parklands and public recreation, and organize for action. “As we deepen our understanding of complex ecological processes, as we improve our technologies and institutions and learn from experience, much more will be possible,” he said. “But these 37 measures represent actions we can take now, and that can move us dramatically forward toward what has become an urgent common goal of all Americans: the rescue of our natural habitat as a place both habitable and hospitable to man.”
Meanwhile, Gaylord Nelson, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin, visited the Santa Barbara oil spill and hoped to turn the same sort of enthusiasm people were bringing to protests against the Vietnam War to efforts to protect the environment. He announced a teach-in on college campuses, which soon grew into a wider movement across the country. Their “Earth Day,” held on April 22, 1970, brought more than 20 million Americans—10% of the total population of the country at the time—to call for the nation to address the damage caused by 150 years of unregulated industrial development. The movement included members of all political parties, rich Americans and their poorer neighbors, people who lived in the city and those in the country, labor leaders and their employers. It is still one of the largest protests in American history.
In July, at the advice of a council convened to figure out how to consolidate government programs to combat pollution, Nixon proposed to Congress a new agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, which Congress created in 1970. This new agency assumed responsibility for the federal regulation of pesticides, and after the Environmental Defense Fund filed suit, in June 1972 the EPA banned DDT. Four months later, Congress passed the Clean Water Act, establishing protections for water quality and regulating pollutant discharges into waters of the United States.
Today, even as Republicans are attacking the EPA by suggesting that Congress cannot delegate major regulatory powers to it, President Joe Biden issued an executive order to promote environmental justice. In the past generation we have come to understand that pollution hits minority and poor populations far harder than it does wealthy white communities: the government and private companies target Indigenous reservations for the storage of nuclear waste, for example, because the reservations are not covered by the same environmental and health standards as the rest of the country.
Today, Biden said, “To fulfill our Nation’s promises of justice, liberty, and equality, every person must have clean air to breathe; clean water to drink; safe and healthy foods to eat; and an environment that is healthy, sustainable, climate-resilient, and free from harmful pollution and chemical exposure. Restoring and protecting a healthy environment—wherever people live, play, work, learn, grow, and worship—is a matter of justice and a fundamental duty that the Federal Government must uphold on behalf of all people.”
Amen.
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OK, collective mind...help me out here.
There's a boat for $200 bucks out in Fresno. Here are two photos of it.
Back in 1938, the Nunes Brothers designed the Mercury, which I'm sure we're all familiar with. I basically learned to sail on a family friends plywood Mercury out of Stillwater Cove. So here's what I remember....the Nunes brothers also built a 20-21 foot version of the boat. Whether it was a scaled up Merc or a completely different design, I don't remember, but I'd swear that boat in Fresno is one of those babies. Only a few were built, maybe about 20? Who can pull this trivia out of their mental archives?
I've pointed out the boat to a local sailor who is currently boatless and really should be working on a boat right now! Ha!....but I've also CC'd a friend in Port Townend whose husband does contract work for the SF Maritime Museum. If this thing really is one of the Nunes boats, and it's not a disaster, it's a cool piece of SF Bay history.
Help me out, here!
There's a boat for $200 bucks out in Fresno. Here are two photos of it.
Back in 1938, the Nunes Brothers designed the Mercury, which I'm sure we're all familiar with. I basically learned to sail on a family friends plywood Mercury out of Stillwater Cove. So here's what I remember....the Nunes brothers also built a 20-21 foot version of the boat. Whether it was a scaled up Merc or a completely different design, I don't remember, but I'd swear that boat in Fresno is one of those babies. Only a few were built, maybe about 20? Who can pull this trivia out of their mental archives?
I've pointed out the boat to a local sailor who is currently boatless and really should be working on a boat right now! Ha!....but I've also CC'd a friend in Port Townend whose husband does contract work for the SF Maritime Museum. If this thing really is one of the Nunes boats, and it's not a disaster, it's a cool piece of SF Bay history.
Help me out, here!
Not sure if this is what you are looking at in Fresno. A bigger Mercury (18 feet) was the Clipper (20'). The Clipper was designed and built by Myron Spaulding of plywood. ~72 were built in Sausalito and they were an active one design class on SF Bay through the 50's and 60's
Whether the boat in Fresno is a Nunes design or Spaulding is open for discussion. To further confuse, in the 1930's and 40's, there was a San Francisco Bay class called the Junior Clipper of which I have a photo of two racing....
PS: If anyone wants to help a good cause, take a case of cat food to Berkeley Marine Center where they currently have 16 rescue cats and say it's from the Singlehanded Sailing Society. Or support Alan's Wildcat plaid design to help restore habitat for the endangered wildcat of Scotland, the rarest cat in the world.
Whether the boat in Fresno is a Nunes design or Spaulding is open for discussion. To further confuse, in the 1930's and 40's, there was a San Francisco Bay class called the Junior Clipper of which I have a photo of two racing....
PS: If anyone wants to help a good cause, take a case of cat food to Berkeley Marine Center where they currently have 16 rescue cats and say it's from the Singlehanded Sailing Society. Or support Alan's Wildcat plaid design to help restore habitat for the endangered wildcat of Scotland, the rarest cat in the world.
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